On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 01:44, Ed Greshko wrote: > You complain/whine about GPL licensing because you have to release your > source code and can't just sell it. Seems like you can't deal with 2 > concepts. Commercial v.s. Open Source. Actually it is commercial vs GPL. Many open source licenses don't restrict what else can be combined and distributed with the original code. > Yes, you may have paid more for support of RHEL than XP. But, what > applications come with XP? Many patented components that can't ever be combined with GPL'd code and legally distributed.... Consider what is in the media player alone. It is easy enough to add free components like OpenOffice or Cygwin to Windows, but how do you add device drivers with patented technology to Linux? > I wonder how many times you've looked to purchase commercial software > only to find that product X has feature Y that you want and product A > has feature B that you want....but you can't find product Z that has > feature Y and B. > > So, what do you do? Could it be that you compromise and get the product > that has the "best" fit? But now, of course, you can't hack the code to > add in the missing features so you "bellyache" to the vendor. And in the commercial case, the vendor has some reason to provide what the customer wants and may be able to make the necessary arrangements. In the GPL-licensed case, it is just impossible to provide it combined with components that are already be controlled by some other license. The end result is that if you need the feature you have to have two complete systems. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
